Patterns of Research

At the conference a number of leading Nordic researchers from the four subjects met scholars from England, Germany and Canada. In focus are questions like: What are the main patterns of research in the respecitve fields? Are there similarities in questions and types of research within these four fields of research? What advices do researchers give teachers, based on their research?

Three research and teaching traditions are presented at length: Joachim Detjen from Germany writes about the German tradition of Politische Bildung, Robert Jackson is discussing the Interpretive approach developed by Jackson and his collaborators at Warwick University, UK, Christine Counsell editor of the journal Teaching History describes the contributions of active teachers to the development of the British tradition of doing history, Stéphane Lévesque from Canada describes how this British history education tradition has been further developed in Canada and US as historical thinking, and Hartwig Haubrich of Germany provides a summary of his comparative studies of international geography education, carried out through several decades. A number of Nordic scholars comment and give their picture of crucial questions within the respective subject in our time.

These questions are addressed in theis volume, a book that deserves to be read by researchers, teacher educators and school teachers interested in research.

The host of the conference was the Centre for Social Science Didactics (CSD) at Karlstad University, one of the leading research and school development groups working with these subjects within the Nordic countries. From 2010 to 2013 CSD is running a large project studying teaching and learning in the four subjects in school years 4-6. A graduate school for active teachers, sponsored by the Swedish government, is another CSD project.